The NYC punk originator and novelist discusses his candid new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, what he wants on his tombstone, and more.

Richard Hell is central to discussions about the early punk scene in Lower Manhattan, though he’s also transcended that space. In 1972, he founded the Neon Boys with childhood friend Tom Verlaine. They went on to expand the band and rename it Television in 1973 and, along with Patti Smith, were one of the first acts from the scene to play CBGB. After Hell quit Television over creative differences in 1975, he formed the Heartbreakers with Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders, shortly after the two had left the New York Dolls. Hell was a handsome, magnetic figure and, a year later, he formed his own band, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, releasing a couple of Lester Bangs-approved records that included two certifiable punk classics, “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts”.

Hell was never an especially technical musician, but he had a great aesthetic sense and smarts: Outside of his bass playing, arranging, and singing, his legacy includes the spiked hair, ripped t-shirts, and safety pins Malcolm McLaren spotted while managing the Dolls-- and eventually brought back to England for his protegees, the Sex Pistols.

Unlike a lot of musicians from the scene surrounding CBGB, Hell hasn’t continued playing. In fact, besides the Dim Stars, his project with Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming that lasted a month in 1992, he retired from music in 1984. The move was a way to separate himself from the lifestyle that got him into drugs, but also offered him a chance to focus entirely on writing. When Hell and Verlaine originally ditched boarding school and relocated to New York City in 1966, they wanted to be poets; it’s just that their music took off first. (Between 1971 and 1973, the two collaborated on the gender-bending Theresa Stern project, where they published poems as the Jewish/Puerto Rican prostitute, accompanied by a photo of their overlapping faces, complete with makeup and wig.)

Photo from the poster for the first Television show, circa 1974

Hell-- a devoted fan of Rimbaud, the French Symbolists, the New York School of Ted Berrigan and Frank O’Hara, and others-- had a regular column in the East Village Eye called “Slum Journals” and ran the literary journal/press, Cuz, where he published his own work along with that of Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles, René Ricard, Nick Tosches, NY School poet Ron Padgett, and more. Raymond Foye’s Hanuman Books imprint published Artifact: Notebooks from Hell 1974-1980in 1992, and Hell's novella, The Voidoid, was released in 1993. Hot and Cold, a collection of writings, drawings, and ephemera came out in 2001. Really, it’s felt like Hell never took a break from scribbling: In 2006, when I published an anthology of downtown NYC literature from 1973-1992, his name and work popped up most frequently.

In 1996, long after the old downtown was dead, Hell published his first novel, Go Now. People mistook it for memoir. His second novel, 2005’s Godlike, riffed on the affair between Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud, among other things-- and people mistook that for memoir, too. I wrote a review of Godlike for The Village Voice at the time, saying “the text's a literary treatise... an attempt to locate a geometry verifying love's reality... and proof again that Hell would have carved a smashing oeuvre even if he'd opted to remain plain old Richard Meyers.” I also said it was his strongest piece of writing to date. That’s no longer true. The honor now goes to I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, a detailed autobiography that takes us from Hell’s youth in Lexington, Kentucky, through to his retirement from music in 1984.

Hell’s lived a life worthy of his punk image, including long bouts with drug addiction, a healthy libido (he refers to himself as a slut, and his descriptions of breasts add up to some of his most vivid writing), and plenty of shit talking about the players within the scene and outside of it. But it’s never that simple. He has issues with one-time best friend Tom Verlaine, but also explains how much he loves him. He takes shots at Patti Smith, though he has a lot of nice things to say about her as well, some of them rather lusty: “She was a natural born sex waif and a pretty-assed comedian.” (He really has nothing bad to say about Dee Dee Ramone, or the Voidoids’ genius guitarist Bob Quine, or his mother.)

And Hell doesn’t sugarcoat his own shortcomings: “I am not cool. I’m cranky under pressure, I’m a mediocre athlete, I get obsessed with women, I usually want to be liked, and I’m not especially street-smart.” We get his track marks, his neuroses, his bad decisions, but he’s always charismatic, even while telling us how “being a rock and roll musician was like being a pimp. It was about making young girls want to pay money to be near you.” And later explaining how, while in his mid-30s, he had sex with a “foul-mouthed, speed-loving” 16-year-old named Ava: “I put my granite hard-on into Ava and watched her face and watched her lips as she said something snotty and grateful to me.”

His reading of why critics liked the less popular second Voidoids album, Destiny Street, is telling: “I figured that was because they were predisposed to favor noise, intellect, and failure.” He never doubts his own intelligence, though the scene at the end of the book, the one that finally gets Hell to quit smack, shows that he also knows drugs (being “chemically oppressed”) could make him do dumb things.

I met with Hell on Valentine’s Day in his Manhattan apartment, the place where he’s lived since 1975. Hell, who looks much younger than his 63 years, was in good spirits, often punctuating his answers with belly laughs. He sat in front of shelves packed with books.

Pitchfork: You’ve been writing for a number of years, why did you decide to do an autobiography now?

Richard Hell: Well, I’ve come to think of myself as a writer of books. [laughs] And I like writing non-fiction, too-- and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot. [laughs] But I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it’s more about the psychology going on. The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. You don’t know how much you can trust your memory. You don’t want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel.

But I started getting intrigued by the idea, probably because I was getting older wondering what my life had been. [laughs] You’re always thinking, “What does that add up to?” You can’t really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I’d seen and done and learned-- all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened. [laughs]

Pitchfork: And you said a problem with autobiography is that you don’t want to hurt feelings, but you’re pretty no-holds-barred here.

RH: I knew that I couldn’t write it any other way. Also, a fair number of the people are dead. And I did change a few names of briefly-appearing characters. If it was dicey, I wrote to the person, like, “Do you mind?” And if they had a big problem, I’d change their name.

Pitchfork: You say a lot of good things about Patti Smith, but you also say her band was generic and that she was calculated.

RH: Well, I couldn’t write this thing without being frank.

Pitchfork: Is she somebody you’ve kept contact with?

RH: We run into each other now and then. It might be less comfortable next time. She’s not the only one. Well, as long as they’re unarmed... [laughs]

Hell in Gardenside, Kentucky, circa 1956

Pitchfork: In the book, you describe going to Debbie Harry’s and seeing a copy of a magazine with the Sex Pistols on it and realizing they’ve adopted your look. What is a moment like that like?

RH: It was funny, like, “Wow, this thing is really catching on.” I was surprised, but then I saw Malcolm [McLaren]’s name, and it was obvious how it had happened. There wasn’t any resentment. And there’s no question that, for me, the Sex Pistols were the essence of that moment. They took all the impulses, purposes, and attitudes, and purely personified them.

Pitchfork: Having been there at the start, what are your thoughts about the idea of punk today?

RH: Frankly, there’s a lot about the concept of punk that I don’t like. For instance, I believe in people treating each other with respect. And there’s a whole side of punk that just has to do with, like: “I’m within my rights to offend everybody, make them uncomfortable, and disrupt whatever they’re doing because I’m asserting myself.” It reminds me of when I was a little kid going to movies, and there’s always somebody in the audience who’d be yelling at the screen and throwing popcorn at people. Fuck that person! I would be completely in favor of gagging and handcuffing them. [laughs]

Hell at Deleware's Sanford School, circa 1966

Pitchfork: You’re not easy on yourself in the book. Was it hard going back and remembering all of your drug problems?

RH: No. Another thing that’s good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that’s always interesting. For me, a whole lot of what writing is trying to put your finger on that. I will not deny that I am moved by the book [laughs], but it doesn't make me sad.

Pitchfork: Often when people are associated with music or art and they write autobiographies, people consider it a memoir. Was it a conscious decision to call this an autobiography and not a memoir?

RH: You know who wrote a good memoir: Pasternak, the Russian poet. And, of course, there’s Rilke’s great Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which is technically not an autobiography either. But I’m not into this memoir craze that’s been going on for 20 years now and doesn’t seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it’s a person writing about their own life. But it’s a useful distinction: a memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person’s life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life. Patti Smith’s book is a memoir; it’s about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. But this book is not just about being a rock'n’roll musician, or being an addict, or a love affair. I’m trying to nail down what my life was.

Pitchfork: When you first started writing I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, did you know that you were going to stop in 1984?

RH: No, though I had this nagging feeling about getting close enough to the present where it’s going to be about people that I’m close to now. I couldn’t see how to deal with that. So as I went along, 1984 became this natural place to end it. It’s funny. One of the promotional readings that I’m giving is at the Marc Jacobs bookstore, and they designed a t-shirt to commemorate the reading and to sell in the store. The front of the t-shirt says “Clean Tramp," and the back says “Richard Fucking Hell," and then underneath that, in parentheses, are the dates, “1949 to 1984." It's like a tombstone. [laughs] In fact, maybe I’ll make my tombstone like that: “Richard Fucking Hell.” Ted Berrigan had a great idea for one: “Out to Lunch.” I had this very cool idea for one: “Out of Control.” [laughs]

Photo by Inez & Vinoodh

Pitchfork: A lot of female characters in the book play big roles. Women often show up for sex, but also for friendship and love. One of these characters, an archetypal figure from that period, is writer and actress Cookie Mueller. What did you take from your experiences with her?

RH: We just really enjoyed each other’s company, but if you’re looking at it conceptually, she was the personification of everything I had come to New York for. I came to New York in 1967 when I was a teenager but I didn’t meet her until 1978. She personified this society of fun and pleasure and laughter and art; this atmosphere of goodwill and happiness completely outside of established conventional values and society.

You know, I spoke at her funeral, which was really embarrassing. I’m someone who’s really susceptible to tears. Did you pick that up in the book at all? I only noticed later myself, but I actually cry four or five times in the book. And I usually don’t think of anyone ever suspecting that I might be someone who’d cry at stuff. I cry at movies all the time. And sometimes it really pisses me off because I hate it when they’re just jerking my chain and it’s just like completely manipulative. But I still can’t help it. And I remember what I said at the funeral. There were four people speaking, including John Waters, and they were all just so casual and funny and full of love. And I just had to go up there and fucking start crying.

Pitchfork: Did writing the book make you miss something like CBGB, or the old New York in general?

RH: No. I don’t spend that much time outside of my apartment. And around the time [CBGB] shut down, it didn’t have any effect on me, so how am I going to miss it? I moved on from that decades ago. And gentrification has been so steady from the beginning. That’s the definition of New York: it’s continuously new. That’s something that’s different about it than most cities in the world. Nothing lasts in New York. Everything’s always changing in really obvious ways. You can hope that you’d be able to put a little restraint on it-- like I’m glad they saved Grand Central, and I wish I could have seen what Penn Station looked like, though I’ve seen pictures of it and it didn’t look that great. And we still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it’s always shifting.

The thing that’s more concerning is how the whole country becomes generic. All the things are the same everywhere. There’s nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can’t tell where you are, it’s all the same.

Pitchfork: I’ve always thought the idea of “Blank Generation” felt prophetic in that sense, that it expanded from a generation to a larger thing: You travel in expanses of emptiness that don’t add up to much. It's all a void.